What is Literacy?

Gee describes literacy as control of secondary use of language. He uses the term "discourse" to illustrate that literacy is primarily learned(as opposed to acquired). A discourse is described as a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or a social network. In different discourse groups, literacy is learned in different way. For example, mainstream children are raised in a setting where the academic level is significantly higher, therefore one can say that literacy is primarily learned due to the setting focusing more on academics. However, for non-mainstream children raised in an area where the academic level is primarily lower, acquisition comes into play because the teaching standard is not as high.

It does change my view because I always assumed that literacy was simply the ability to be able to read text. It was interesting to learn that so many more factors come into play when it comes to reading and comprehending words and sentence structure. I was raised in an upper-middle class area, therefore literacy was more easily accessible to me. It was never an issue on whether or not literacy would be learned.